3rd Week

I've finally settled into the schedule for life down here. I'm used to waking up at 6, and now I'm hungry at the right times too! Work this week was spent, once again, getting the slaggers to work. We got a new gun and I played with the machines for 2 days! But finally, on Thursday afternoon we had 2 guns working at the same time! Then on Friday we did work for South Bend Branch members. The deal was that we worked, and they paid the missionaries a donation for our labor. I ended up stripping stain off of a deck, which is far more difficult than I was hoping coming into it. It was a lot of scrubbing and powerwashing for about 8 hours!It was great to work for another cause besides our own self benefit. We had two talks too, one about the extensive history of the People of Praise, and one about the Spirit and Purpose of the People of praise. Both helped me understand the POP a lot more; how it came, what we're doing and why, when really cool things happened, like the beginning of Trinity. I am now way more excited than ever to work for the People of Praise and help it accomplish our goal of 200 new cities in 40 years! Glory!

Friday night was the first Community meeting for us this summer. It was a great meeting with a ton of people I didn't know! We watched the 3rd Indy Video which you can see here http://www.citybuilder.org/ The sight has a few videos from Indy and pictures too! After the meeting we went to the Pruess' and played some ping pong, pool and fooseball. Good times... I met a ton of new people! I got home late though and stayed up later so I didn't get enough sleep! Saturday I made some more bread! 28 loaves!

COUNT 'EM!

Sunday I went to church and then over to the Zusi's for brunch! It was a great meal and conversation followed by a game of baseball with the little Zusi's and then some intense volleyball for a couple hours! It was awesome! Then we headed over to the Heintzelman's for dinner! South Benders are so hospitable! At the Heintzelman's we had a really great meal full of all the summer goodies: corn on the cob, watermelon, patato salad, sloppy joes... etc. Then I had 4 or 5 brownies for dessert! After that we came home and watched Usual Suspects, our first movie this summer.

Baseball at the Zusi's... yes I tagged out a 5 year old.

Here's a couple clips from our life:

I thought this was cool. Jeremy Osterhouse built it with all the cans from around the One Ten office. This is David Salmon's desk...his boss who's on vacation!



This is how we do dishes around here, there IS a ton of 'em, we might as well make 'em fun!

The Night of Wonders

On Sunday night, there was the most incredible show of nature ever, and it can only be barely grasped at with a bunch of pictures.

Ahh beautiful shot... sunset... roofline of a mansion...WOW. Thanks Chris Milliren.

The sun in all its glory!

Wait! Turn around, and there's the rainbow! And the sun just barely hitting the tops of the trees!

Here's a panorama of the whole thing... incredible. Thanks Collin Anderson.

Hold on! Lightning too! Captured in a hurry it seems. Thanks Joe Bulger.

This was the most incredible night of nature I've experienced. Thank you Lord! And I promise you, it was way better in person

Indy week!

This week was our first full week! It was great! Monday through Thursday we worked 8 hrs a day. I slagged the fence most of that time, which involved playing with the machine and sorta getting it to work, but finally calling up the pro, Randy. He sold us our machine and knew pretty much everything there is to know about slagging. So, turns out our machine was not firing with enough pressure, and both nozzles at the front were worn down way too big. So he took our machine to fix it, and has ordered the nozzles. Another bonus is that David also ordered 2 more new slaggers! Now we can have 3 people slagging at a time and it will be way more fun! (If thats possible.) One day while the slagger was broken I moved boxes from the top floor of this mansion to to basement, 3 flights of stairs! The best part of that was going on the roof of the mansion, 3 stories up. We got pictures:

That's the front door to this mansion I'm living in!

Here you can see the auditorium which used to be a chapel when the nuns owned it, and the school in the back.

So work's been great.

This week the talks were on manliness; kind of a counter cultural way of looking at it, but I won't go into details. Another thing we did this week in free time was playing quadrat, a sweet soccer 4-square combination game. It was great to have a bunch of guys out there playing. I think we had 11 at one point. Another day after work we took a pile of bricks and made a bridge because David didn't think we could. So to prove him wrong we built a bridge expanding a 4 brick gap, and then to rub it in a bit we had him stand on it, and it held! After that we used them as dominoes, and made a nice long course that... sorta worked. (See the video) Just another couple examples of what happens when life is in common and everyone's free time is the same time!


Brick Dominoes!

And these are the Kane kids, William and Leo, watching Chris on the tractor. They are the coolest kids ever who love to come over and watch us work. Its so fun!

The highlight of the week though, by far, was our trip to Indianapolis to help out the missionaries there, my brother included! On Wednesday David informed us that we were leaving the next night for Indy, right after dinner. So Thursday we packed our small rubbermade totes full of work clothes, dress clothes, and a sheet, along with work boots and a pillow into a car and a van and set off for Indy. We arrived at 11 and went to bed, sleeping on the floor with just a sheet and pillow, missionary style! We woke up for an hour of prayer at 6 and started work by 7:30 without breakfast, fasting missionary style! Our work was demolition on a newly acquired house of theirs down there. By the end we had overfilled our dumpster and made a few dump runs with the truck with sheetrock, doors, flooring and trim taken out of this very old house. I spent a good chunk of the time hanging a couple doors with David. It was great, we had to make the opening bigger for the front door so I had to split the 2x4's on the side vertically with a circular saw, using the saw in the exact wrong way. But we got it done without much injury, and it looks great and the house is ready for action trips to start work on it!

The dumpster full of junk.

Me hangin a door. Yes I haven't shaved in a while.

The finished, brand new door!

Friday night we had a cookout in the South Side neighborhood. There were over 150 people there, and over half of them were kids! One of their new activities is bringing together the kids and teaching them bible stories and performing skits with them all. The Lord has been calling them to this and its been working great, as could obviously be seen at the cookout. Saturday night we had a gigantic Lord's Day, with 0ver 50 people! Afterwards we played some cranium, soccer, and had a fire! It was an awesome evening. Sunday was church (with an abnormal amount of pastries!) and then swimming at the Porter's pool! They were generous enough to let all 20 or so of us use their pool. Another great time with all the guys. Now I'm back in South Bend and very tired after a long, awesome week.

Praise God! Keep checkin!

First Week

Its been 2 days of work, 2 days of talks, and a lifestyle more scheduled than I have ever been a part of! The thing about living amongst 21 other young men is that real friendships are more freely developed. One reason is that we all wear white and gray T's, almost always khaki shorts, and 3 quarters of us have hair less than a half inch. Outter appearances simply are not a factor. We are then more able to differentiate between people more through how they act and what they are like rather than how they look and what they wear. This is an ideal throughout many groups of people I have been involved in, but only here have I fully basked in its glory.

Chris setting the very large table.

Another part I have loved is the work we do. They way we work together is of utmost humility, and the proper understandings of authority and servitude. Our leaders lead mercifully, and we all serve happily. I have spent 12 hours so far "slagging" a fence. Slagging is the process of standing at the end of a hose with a trigger and blasting an iron fence with water with tiny bits of metal and glass mixed in in order to take off the paint and rust. Those bits of glass bounce of the fence straight at your mask and arms. David asked me to do this, so I did, and Zach and I have had a great time doing it, though I must say my favorite parts were the times when the machine broke. We have spent almost as much time fixing the machine as slagging, but it's been a great time figuring out the machinery every time.

The talks given are incredible. They have so much practical knowledge on how to live life. Its like a humane seminar about exactly what I've actually cared about in that class for the past 4 years. After each talk we also discuss it and ask questions, the incredible amount of wisdom given to us through them is awesome. We've learned about freindship, right speach, being a servant, authority and obedience, how to correct someone, and having good conversation. And its only been 4 days! I took great notes (of course), and doodled meanwhile.

The most interesting part of my week, though, or at least the most fun to tell happened today. I made 28 loaves of bread! With 22 men to feed for a week, lots of bread is necessary. So for my Saturday "chore" I was assigned to bread making. It sure beats scrubbing the bathroom in 23 steps! Heres some pics:
The huge sector of kneaded bread rising. This was only a quarter of the bread we made today.

Some bread right before we put it in the oven.

Freshly baked bread, straight out of the oven. Yum!

I'm excited for all that the Lord will do this summer! I'll keep you posted. God bless!

The Beginnings of the summer

Sunday night was my grad party. I was a great evening of talking, snacking, smoking, and hanging out with seniors until 2 in the morning. Planning on leaving the next morning, I said my goodbyes, expecting not to see everyone again until I got back in August.

On sunday night, after everyone else had left, planning on leaving the next day, all the 5 seniors buzzed our hair out of a great desire for efficiency, imagining that we would not see most people who actually cared about the length of our hair until it was, in fact, long again. Then after our wonderful adventure with the megabus, we buzzed peters hair the next night, and with newly aquired experience, had a bit of fun with it. Enjoy some pics:

The mullet!

waiting for the slaughter...

Everybody got a chance to do some buzzin...

peter wins for the coolest temporary hair, thanks to nick

The megabus adventure mentioned aforehand was quite a dissapointing experience at the time, but turned out to be an alright day. Basically, we had ordered a ticket for Sunday when we were supposed to be leaving Monday. Ignorant of this fact, we arrived 15 minutes early, and got in line to put our bags in the bus. When we reached the driver loading the bus, he looked at our ticket, explained it was an "old ticket." Then he said we should call customer service. Now before I continue, I must say that we got what we payed for so I can't be too angry, it was $30 a piece, very cheap for a 7 hr trip. So I called their "customer service" and got some lady named "Chaleen" who told me that if the driver let us, then we could ride that bus. So I went and told the driver that, but, suspicious from the start, he wanted to call "headquarters" and verify that we, in fact, called. But it took him forever to contact them, and then they had no records of a "Chaleen" working there, and no record of a call from 6 guys, one that should stand out. The driver had to leave to the next station and he said he'd keep trying... yeah right. So he told us to follow him. That's when I called my Dad and told him to come pick us up and bring us over to the next station. He did, what a great guy! Then we bartered some more with the annoyed driver until he finally called them again and still had no record of our call, so he said "Its not my problem" and got on the bus and drove away.

So, we had nothing to do all day, and so we went to my house, and picked up after my party! Man it was a mess... Then we napped, sat around, and talked to peeps, told our story. But then Mr. Bowar took us out to lunch! Another great guy! We went to El Loro... yum! Then we went to my favorite store ever, Burn. Its a cigar shop in Bville, and Andy and I bought some big ones. Then we drove to Peter's cabin, sat around, smoked the cigar, painted a raft, went to an island, and had dinner. It was a good day. Then we came home, had some peeps over and said bye again... for real this time.

The next morning Mr. Bulger drove us in, what a nice guy! We finally made our way onto the bus, no complications this time! Praise God! The coolest part about the bus was that it was a double decker! So, of course, we sat up top! There were enough seats close together so that we could all sit by eachother, and so I spent 7 hrs of my tuesday sitting next to Andy sleeping, listening to music, listening to Mitch Hedberg (laughing our heads off despite the funny looks we were getting from the rest of the bus), and playing Zelda. Overall a great trip. Upon arriving in Chigago, we got picked up by a couple other guys on the CSI who had arrived the day before, on time. So it was a 2 hr trip back to South Bend in a 7 passenger van with 8 people. Crowded as it was we managed to have fun with my 3 different Rubik's cubes. Joe Bulger has figured out the triangle one, it was only a matter of time for him.

Upon arriving to South Bend we approached a HUGE mansion in which we are staying and are currently living in 4 of its main level rooms. The history of the building is incredible. We live in an old garage, now transformed into a dining room, which was transformed into a stuff room and bed room. We were each given a bunk, a drawer for our junk, and a cubic foot tote for ALL our clothes. Living in household is all about being efficient, with time, space, and food. Its been great!

That was long, I'm planning on posting once a week, so keep looking!